However, what if you want something more normal, just something like this? You want to rotate a letter or A4 piece of paper 90 degrees, and fold it in half.

This means some juggling with the page printing order. For the folding to come out right, you need an eight-page brochure to print like this. Half are on one side of the paper and half are on the other.

You could do this through mental gyrations. Or you can do it with the OpenOffice.org Writer brochure setting under print options.

You just need to do a few things to make it work well.

Step 1: Set up your page normally (portrait) but....

For whatever reason, the brochure printing prints a little short of filling the eight vertical inches appropriately. So for printing on letter size paper sideways, I recommend an 8 1/2 by 13 page size. Choose Format > Page, Page tab and set the size there. I also recommend mirrored setup and a nice big inner margin as shown.

Step 2: Make your content and heading fonts a little bigger

The whole document will be shrunk when it's turned and printed so I recommend increasing all font sizes about 2 points, possibly more for extra readability.

Comments

Hello. Thanks for the HowTO. I have always wanted to know if I could make brochures in Writer whenever I have to make a brochure for my classes. Normally, I do not have the time to look for alternatives, so I used my school's MS Publisher to do it. This tutorial will prove to be helpful in the future. Thanks a lot!

PS: Just to make sure, pictures and other graphics can be added to the separate pages? And, is it possible to make my own custom template which builds on top of yours? I know theoretically it should be possible. Well, thanks again.

Hi,
Your tutorial is a clear exposition of the process and agrees with my experience.
However I have noticed an anomaly concerning printing duplex.

If I have 4 A4 pages, and wish to print 2 A5 size booklets, I set Properties to - Orientation=Landscape, Duplex=On-Landscape.
Options - Left=On, Right=On, Brochure=On.
Print - Range=All, Copies=1.
And I get an A5 Brochure as expected.

But if in Print I set for 2 copies - I get 2 booklets,
one with only the odd pages, and one with only even pages.

Is this a problem with the printer driver or OOO-writer, or have I missed something?

Clearly when I print 20 page booklets I only ever print one at a time. I only noticed this problem when I tried to print several 4 page booklets.
Thanks in advance for any help you can give.
Cheers,
Ken

Hi,
Thanks for your reply. It is an oddity and I can imagine the solution is buried deep in the logic of the programming.
It is not insuperable, I only need to revert to printing (left pages) single side, turning the stack of paper over and printing right pages.

Thanks for the tip. I'm wondering if I'm encountering a bug with OO3. When I try to print to a brochure (via the print options) I get extra white pages for documents that are larger than 4 pages. I even downloaded the template from the March 17, 2008 example (10 pages and it prints to 6 pages and I have 2 white sections for page 11 and then the back cover).

Follow-up. I added 2 more pages to the template I downloaded and it prints as I expect - to 6 pages.

Ok testing a theory, I have a 6 page OO document to print to brochure - should =3 pages but it prints to 4.

I can not get OO to print to an odd number of brochure pages. Does it work properly in 2.4?

I found my problem. Not enough coffee. The real solution was to print it out duplex and see how it would really work instead of PDF files on the screen. I understand now what the brochure printing did to the number of pages and now I know better.

I found my problem. Not enough coffee. The real solution was to print it out duplex and see how it would really work instead of PDF files on the screen. I understand now what the brochure printing did to the number of pages and now I know better.

I found my problem. Not enough coffee. The real solution was to print it out duplex and see how it would really work instead of PDF files on the screen. I understand now what the brochure printing did to the number of pages and now I know better.

I find that this is still a bad method of creating booklets. It doesn't give me the option of creating signatures for a larger book, also it doesn't allow me to create the book the actual size.

As much as I hate Office 2007, the bookfold option and booklet creation is much more straight forward and works better and easier. I hope that this is addressed in future editions as I prefer using OpenOffice for my word processing requirements.

I've been trying to easily create my own books for years, now it seems that I can do it with my work computer. Soon I hope to be able to do this at home.

This is so easy in Word that what it really is about is that OpenOffice really isn't ready for prime time yet. In fact, it's still very difficult, if not impossible to do a find and replace of manual line breaks in OO. In addition, when converting to or from a Word file with graphics, the formatting will not remain stable.

OpenOffice (and NeoOffice for the Mac) is a great idea and the people who work on it deserve a lot of kudos, but it just isn't up to snuff yet.

Why (below Step 1) do you use 8.5x13 for letter size (8.5x11, not A4)? I want to print a 24 page booklet using A4 paper, which meant setting paper size to A5 for each page and paper at A4. Everything worked fine with results like your 8- page sample except that I want to have it printed on back so can simply fold the whole thing for folder. I had 'brochure checked' and simply checked 'double-sided.' Result was tiny tiny print as if finished pages were to be about 5.5x4.5. I'm stumped. (Oo 3.1) Printer will do double sided - shows how to reinsert paper with popup.
Thanks!

Regarding going between Word and Writer with graphics, there are some issues, but it matters a great deal how those graphics were done in the first place. A graphic with separate callouts just isn't stable and won't go between any two processors that well. Keep graphics as a single entity or in a frame. Also, anchor As Character (right-click on a graphic and choose Anchor > As Character) for the most stability in my opinion.

Thanks, Solveig.
Yes, I did print landscape. Everything was fine writing A5 and printing A4 but printed just on one side. I only changed to 'double-sided' setting, which resulted in tiny tiny print on only part of the page (although on both sides). I guess I can always just print on one side and then cut them, arrange pages properly and let print shop print up the booklets for me.

I'm trying to make an address book like a brochure that I can put inside a DayTimer pocket-sized calendar (pages are approx. 2.7" by 5" and wonder if OOW can do something this small (multiple addresses per page, natch). The ideal would be to import the data from the spreadsheet where I've entered names, emails, etc. - but first the printing challenge! Can the instructions here be applied to more pages per sheet to end up with a smaller brochure?